11 Comments
Sep 24Liked by Kevin Munger

Icing on the cake of this absolute banger of a post is the paper “High replicability of newly discovered social-behavioural findings is achievable” was retracted today.

Expand full comment
author

that is wild. I had seen the statement of concern, so I knew something was up, but a full retraction...

Expand full comment

That was a fun read! I learned lots of new names--including this guy Lakens.

But I have a different question: you use Phillip Mirowski's paper to argue that open science (at least the one organized through pre-registrations and open data) is neoliberal. But I guess my question is: so what? If I remember Mirowski's paper right, he seems to imply that Wikipedia is neoliberal (and by his definition, it is) and that is somehow a bad thing (because substantive expertise something something neoliberal something something). But I think, neoliberal or not, a world with Wikipedia is better than a world without it. So, while I agree with you that we don't want all the sciences to adopt one particular regime of open science, what's so wrong if it is neoliberal?

Expand full comment
author

First, I think that mirowski is wrong about Wikipedia. There’s a good amount of this paper I disagree with. But the “so what” is that we should denaturalize the myth of a non-political open science. I’m less interested in the specific tenets of open science being neoliberal than in the fact that it is, indeed, and ethos

Expand full comment

Two points:

First, if we want to "denaturalize the myth of a non-political open science," why not just say so rather than calling it neoliberal?

But second, and more fundamental, *why* do we have "denaturalize the myth of a non-political open science"? To whom? Scientists already know that science is political. And these days, I think the broader public is pretty disillusioned about science. I think that the boat for building a non-political science has long sailed -- or maybe the right metaphor here is that it's already sunk and we have no way of resuscitating it. We are stuck in a world where most people understand science to be political.

Expand full comment
author

Yeah that’s it. And to Shreeharsh—yes I think that many people accept science is political.

But the whole post is about one, prominent scientist who does not! Replete with quotations! And to Chris’ point, I think that pointing to one specific way it’s political is a more effective move. I’m not trying to equate “neoliberal == bad”—some of my best friends are neoliberal!

Expand full comment

Thanks, Chris and Kevin, for your responses. I don't want to be a troll so I promise this will be my last post on the topic but I truly don't understand some of the things you are saying here about neoliberalism and politics.

Chris says that pre-registration and open data embody a ""neoliberal" logic that fetishizes technocratic efficiency, standardized procedures and arbitrary metrics at the expense of reality" but can you say exactly how preregistration and open data lead to this? Also, what's wrong with standardization and efficiency as values? Here is one group of scientists who have had great success in standardizing and creating what they would argue is better science and experimentation: https://www.nature.com/articles/548387a. Maybe standardization is not the way to go for everyone but the way I read Chris is that he's saying that efficiency and standardization (neoliberal strategies?) are bad, tout court. (And also, the implied definition of neoliberalism here seems to be any policy that promotes efficiency and standardization--so pretty much everything because all our technologies run on standards.)

All I see in this episode is science reformers advocating measures (and contesting them) to do better science. Of course, these measures are political; how could they not be? And while I don't know much about this guy Lakens, I've read quite a bit of Andrew Gelman who's also a science reformer and while he clearly knows and understands science is political, what I see him advocating for most of the time are certain techniques he thinks make for better science. He doesn't say "science is political; here are my techniques"; he says "I think we do a lot of bad science and here's how we can do better science." That, at least, is how I read "The Garden of Forking Paths" which is not an argument for pre-registration or open data but is an argument about how to do good statistics, Gelman style. That's what reformers do; it seems like they would have to in order to be successful.

So, by all means, oppose reforms that you think are wrong-headed or unnecessary, is it really necessary to call them "neoliberal" to discredit them? Because no one really knows what the word means and hardly any progressives will self-describe as that (Kevin, I suspect your neoliberal friends will disclaim the label).

Expand full comment
author

"what's wrong with standardization and efficiency as values?"

This question illustrates my point. What's wrong with them is that these aren't the only values. This is why it's important to de-naturalize the ideology that claims that these are uncontroversial values.

In practice, I think that technocratic, quantitative governance makes it *easy* to optimize for these values -- and that other values aren't given sufficient weight as a result.

Expand full comment
Sep 28·edited Sep 28Liked by Kevin Munger

While I agree with Kevin and Chris here, I do agree with Shreeharsh about language. "neoliberal", like "fascist", unfortunately means whatever people want it to mean in common discourse. Even in academic discourse, neoliberal tends to be too slippery.

Most college educated people don't think of themselves as neoliberal technocrats, so you have to gently argue how they are working against their own and their colleagues' interests.

To the average scientist who doesn't read political science, "transparency" and "rigor" sound like unmistakable goods. And yet, the only way to enforce transparency is through making new rules and begetting more metrics and bureaucracy.

Expand full comment

I won't belabor either since the thread is already long - just a quick note for Shreeharsh that I found these respective articles by Tunc and Hostler helpful for contextualizing some of the "neoliberal" talk around Open Science, in working backward to other cited authors. (Tunc herself would probably side with Lakens).

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916221114835

https://online.ucpress.edu/collabra/article/10/1/121383/203136

Expand full comment
Sep 26·edited Sep 26Liked by Kevin Munger

What I took from his post re. this point (he should correct me if I'm off here!) is:

1) "neoliberal" has a certain amount of explanatory power, as a well-documented ideology with identifiable roots and features directly bearing on the present debate. It is not just that open science is political and we want to denaturalize the myth that it isn't. It is that to do this also requires calling out the specific politics (and related fallacies or bad-faith arguments) that perpetuate this myth, undermining efforts at a more valid metascience. Including, a "neoliberal" logic that fetishizes technocratic efficiency, standardized procedures and arbitrary metrics at the expense of reality.

2) Even if many give lip service to science being "political," this is different from recognizing how *metascience* is similarly political (especially metascience positioning itself as the remedy to the former). And there is a very live debate about how this metascience is to be pursued, with powerful interests trying to impose a problematic top-down vision.

3) It is not that open science is "political" only in a depressing sense, leaving us stuck in a world of disillusion. "Political" means value and agenda-laden for better or worse, and there are possibilities and choices for making metascience better not worse - so the first step is to stop doing bad politics and bad philosophy of science.

Expand full comment
Error